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Turning turtles
13:58:46 19/10/2007
More sea turtles in UK waters
US and Mexican conservation efforts may have boosted the number of sea turtles visiting UK waters, according to University of Exeter biologists.
More than 100 years worth of data was analysed by researchers, who concluded that the number of loggerhead and Kemp’s ridley turtles coming to Britain has increased.
These turtles are strictly protected in the US and Mexico, where turtle excluder devices were introduced into fishing nets in the 1990s. Absent in UK waters since 1974, the Kemp’s ridley turtle is now the third most common turtle to visit the British Isles – a boom that coincided with changes in US conservation efforts.
“Following a severe decline as a result of human activity in the first-half of the last century, we can now see the positive effect that recent conservation efforts have had on these turtle species,” said Matthew Witt, a biologist at Exeter University. “We need more research to verify this, but the results from this study are very encouraging.”
A large number of turtles – leatherback, loggerhead and Kemp’s ridley – spend up to four years traveling thousands of miles from their nesting sites in North America to British waters. This annual migration is thought to be associated with variations in ocean currents.
Lizzie Fox
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